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the seat of any hostile spiritual influence, the Mikado was not malevolent towards his own people, and yet contact, direct or indirect, with him or them was avoided as scrupulously as contact with a corpse. Besides, the rites for driving away the spirit of the deceased-and there are many such rites are altogether distinct from and have nothing in common with the precautions taken to prevent contact with the corpse. Fear of evil spirits, therefore, cannot be the source of the world-wide institution of taboo. source was, we have yet to consider-in our next chapter.

What the

1 For some Indo-European rites, see my paper in the Classical Review for June 1895.

CHAPTER VIII

TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION

IN Polynesia the institution of taboo was closely entwined with the social and political constitutions of the various states; taboos were imposed by the priests and the nobility, and the unwritten code of taboo corresponded in many important respects with the legal and social codes of more advanced civilisations. It is not, therefore, surprising that the earlier students of the system regarded it as an artificial invention, a piece of state-craft, cunningly devised in the interests of the nobility and priests. This view is, however, now generally abandoned. Wider researches have shown that the institution is not due to state-enactment or to priest-craft, for the simple reason that it is most at home in communities which have no state-organisation, and flourishes where there are no priests or no priesthood. Above all, the belief is not artificial and imposed, but spontaneous and universal.

Taboo was next explained, and is still explained, as a religious observance; everything belonging to or connected with a god is forbidden or taboo to man. This explanation, however, has the fault, fatal to a hypothesis, of not accounting 'for all the facts. It is true that everything sacred is taboo; it is not true that everything taboo is sacred. Temples and all the apparatus of ritual belong to the god, and therefore are taboo; and even the corpse-taboo may be brought into a sort of harmony with this theory, if we assume that the spirit which has left the corpse becomes a god, and if we also further assume that the spirit is regarded as hostile by the mourners. With a little more strain upon the theory, it can be made also to explain the blood-taboo; for the blood

is commonly regarded as the seat of, or as itself being the life and the spirit. But it seems too great a strain to say that "new-born children belonged also to the god, and therefore were strictly taboo, together with their mothers." In fine, it is impossible to make out that all things "unclean' were originally "sacred," or to show that the carcases of vermin2 ever "belonged" to any god.

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The latest theory of taboo is that put forward by Mr. Crawley. In his own words, "the principle of Social Taboo is an idea. . . that the attributes assigned to the individual who is feared, loathed, or despised are materially transmissible by contact of any sort." The expression The expression "Social Taboo " seems to imply that its author does not claim for his principle that it explains religious taboo. Anyhow, the gods are not "loathed or despised," and their "attributes" would seem. rather to be desirable than things to be shunned. But, without labouring the argument that no explanation is satisfactory which does not account for all the facts, religious as well as social; and without denying that savages think "qualities are transmissible by physical contact, we may still point out that it is not the transmission of loathed or despised attributes -such as the weakness and timidity of women-that savages fear. "An Australian black-fellow, who discovered that his wife had lain on his blanket . . . died of terror in a fortnight." 4 There was something more here than fear of becoming weak and timid. Again, it is surely a "social" taboo which forbids a slave from touching a chieftain's food; but the sanction of the taboo is no mere fear of contracting the chief's "qualities," as the following instance shows:-" It happened that a New Zealand chief of high rank and great sanctity had left the remains of his dinner by the wayside. A slave, a stout, hungry fellow, coming up after the chief had gone, saw the unfinished dinner, and ate it up without asking questions. Hardly had he finished, when he was informed by a horror-stricken spectator that the food of which he had eaten was the chief's. 'I knew the unfortunate delinquent well. He was remarkable for courage, and had signalised

1 Gerland, Anthropologie, vi. 346.
Folk-Lore (June 1895), vi. 2. 130.

2 Lev. xi. 32 ff.

4 Frazer, Golden Bough, i. 170, referring to Journ. Anthrop. Inst. ix. 458.

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himself in the wars of the tribe. No sooner did he hear the fatal news than he was seized by the most extraordinary convulsions and cramp in the stomach, which never ceased till he died, about sun-down the same day.'"1 Contact with the Mikado's clothes or drinking vessels was avoided, not from fear of contracting any of his qualities, but because the clothes would cause swellings and pains all over the body, and the vessels would burn up the throat. Contact with a corpse, which might, one would have thought, lead to contracting the "quality" of death, produces loss of hair and teeth.2 In Whydah the negroes may not look upon the sacred python, when it goes in procession, because, if they did," their bodies would at once become the prey of loathsome maggots.' Fear of contracting the qualities of the thing loathed does not, as far as appears, seem to be alleged by the savage as his reason for avoiding persons or things taboo. is not commonly explicit as to the consequences of breaking taboo; he only gets so far as something plainly suggested by the association of ideas, e.g. tabooed food will disagree with him more or less seriously; clothes be, like the robe steeped in the blood of Nessus, more or less uncomfortable. But as a rule the consequences are left in the vague; they are matter for private and divers conjectures the one thing about which the savage has no doubt is that the taboo must not be broken. In fine, the imperative of taboo is categorical, not hypothetical.

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The last sentence will have reminded the reader that, according to the Intuitionist school of moral philosophers, what distinguishes the Moral Sentiment and Ethical Laws from all others is precisely the fact that their commands are categorical, and that they require unconditional obedience without regard to the consequences. The man who is honest

because to be honest is the best policy, is not actuated by a moral motive, for if dishonesty were a better policy, he would, for the same reason, pursue it; whereas the truly good man is he who does what is right because it is right, no matter what the consequences. That there is further a real connection between taboo and morality has been noticed by Mr. Frazer, op. cit. 168, and A Pakeha Maori, Old New Zealand, 96. 2 Crawley, Folk-Lore, loc. cit. Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 61.

Frazer, who says taboo "subserved the progress of civilisation by fostering conceptions of the rights of property and the sanctity of the marriage tie. . . . We shall scarcely err in believing that even in advanced societies the moral sentiments, in so far as they are merely sentiments, and are not based on an induction from experience, derive much of their force from an original system of taboo." 1

We may now, taking leave of previous theories of taboo, go on our own way; and, as our starting-point, we will take. the fact that among savages universally there are some things. which categorically and unconditionally must not be done. That this feeling is a "primitive" sentiment, a tendency inherent in the mind of man, the following considerations will, I hope, incline the reader to believe. Though all things taboo are dangerous, not all dangerous things are taboo; for instance, it is not taboo to eat poisonous plants, handle venomous serpents, jump over a precipice, beard the lion, or, in fine, to do anything the danger of which you can discover for yourself, either by your own experience or that of others. On the contrary, it is things which experience could never teach you to be dangerous that are taboo, such as touching a new-born child, or the water in which a holy person has washed. Indeed, experience, so far from being able to generate the belief that these things are dangerous, would have shown that there was no danger in them, and would not have given rise to but have destroyed the belief -the proof of which is that, in Polynesia, the belief in taboo has been broken down chiefly by the fact that Europeans violated taboos innumerable, and were, as the natives saw, none the worse. The sentiment, then, as it appears even in its earliest and lowest manifestations, cannot have been derived from experience; it is prior to and even contradictory to experience. In fine, it is an inherent tendency of the human mind; and as such it does not stand isolated and alone, for in a previous chapter we have seen that the belief in the uniformity of nature, the tendency to expect what has once happened to happen again, is independent of, as it is often disappointed by experience. Between these two sentiments, namely, the positive belief that what you have done Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. "Taboo."

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